Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  Whatever arguments Paul used in that address, which, as we conjecture, he most probably delivered, it was not received with general acclaim…and the grave insults hurled at him on that occasion may have been so offensive and so hard to take that he could never forget or forgive them. Perhaps the seed of his future hatred of the Jews—that is, of the Jews who had stuck to their religion—that hatred which seethed in his later writings, had its origin in that bitter experience and his subsequent encounters with the faithful Jews of Burgos in those crucial days.7

  Yes, perhaps. Probably, as one may conjecture. What is known to have happened is that many members of the Jewish community of Burgos, like Jews in other cities, converted—and many did not. Some wealthy Jews found a haven during the attacks in the homes of wealthy Christians, whom they paid for offering them shelter. “Thus,” Netanyahu argues, “Paul’s presumed prognostication did not prove entirely true. Rich Jews could have saved themselves without being converted.”8 Well, that settles it. Jews with enough money to save themselves by paying off the goyim are morally superior to those who converted to save their lives and possessions. Although Paul of Burgos is far from an inspiring figure in Jewish history, there is something arrogant and anachronistic about the passage of judgment from late-twentieth-century Israel (or, for that matter, America) on Diaspora Jews of a distant era who could, possibly, have saved themselves from both death and apostasy by paying off Gentiles. However, the same judgment was also passed by a number of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century rabbis in North Africa and the Middle East; though few of them had lived in Iberia themselves, they parsed the conditions for distinguishing between a Marrano and a member of the anousim. With friends like this, what Jew seeing his world collapse around him needs enemies? (These assessments seem particularly harsh in view of our knowledge about what money could—and could not—buy from Gentiles when twentieth-century European Jews attempted to escape the Nazis.)

  The second reconstruction of Paul’s conversion, offered by Baer and many other mainstream Jewish historians, is no more flattering about Paul’s career as a Christian prelate and diplomat but is uncontaminated by an ideology maintaining that it is possible to speak with certainty of “voluntary” conversions in circumstances like those prevailing in Spain in the 1390s. Though also using the blunt word “apostasy” to describe Paul’s conversion, Baer emphasizes that this famous change of faith and communal loyalty was inextricably “connected with and symptomatic of the general destruction.”9 Although Baer agrees with Netanyahu that Paul soon turned into an outright enemy of Jews who refused to convert, the former never suggests that freedom of religious choice could truly exist in an environment where Jews were threatened with the loss of both their lives and their property. Baer is also somewhat less convinced than Netanyahu that forced converts were seduced by the theological appeal of Christianity as a result of the rich (and, no doubt, doubt-provoking) contacts among religious scholars in Andalusia during the most tolerant period of the Convivencia. If familiarity with the religious thinking of others had been sufficient to seduce Jews and Muslims away from their faiths, there would never have been any reason for Christian persecutions designed to force conversions. In any era, familiarity with other faiths, or at least one other faith, is necessary but not sufficient for religious conversion.

  Whatever the original combination of motives for Solomon ha-Levi, he began propagandizing for Christianity among his Jewish acquaintances soon after his official change of faith. In a letter to his friend Joseph Orabuena, he asserted, as any convert from Judaism to Christianity must, that the Old Testament prophecies of the coming of the Messiah had been fulfilled by the coming of Jesus. The letter was widely circulated among Jewish intellectuals. One of Paul’s old friends, Joshua ha-Lorki, a physician and Talmudic scholar who later converted to Christianity himself, asked, “Did you perchance lust after riches and honors?…Or did the study of philosophy cause you…to regard the proofs of faith as vanity and delusion? Or, when you beheld the doom of our homeland, the multitude of the afflictions that have recently befallen us, did it then seem to you that the name of Israel would be remembered no more? Or perhaps…you saw that our fathers had inherited falsehood…?”10 Ha-Lorki, who eventually became the antipope Benedict’s personal physician while he was still a Jew, converted to Christianity in 1412 and took the name Hieronymus de Santa Fide.

  Ha-Lorki’s side of the correspondence—much more extensively preserved than Paul’s—does reflect the doubts and questioning that attested to the influence of Averroism on Iberian intellectuals of all faiths. Ha-Lorki asks whether it is the duty of a religious believer to investigate his faith and determine whether it is true. The conundrum ha-Lorki cites is that, if investigation of religious truth is a moral duty, “then no religious man anywhere in the world would be faithful to his religion, but would be constantly doubting and questioning.” Yet, if it is forbidden to inquire, “it follows that any believer can be saved by his own religion, and that one religion is not superior to another.”11 That is precisely what the thinkers of the Enlightenment would say in another three hundred years.*5

  It certainly does not follow that Averroism would have led Jewish intellectuals in Spain to turn to the Catholic Church. The dogmas of Catholicism were, after all, even more antithetical to Averroës’s early form of freethought than Talmudic inquiry was. Baer, though acknowledging that Catholic dogma was irreconcilable with the Averroist “religion of the intellect,” argues that the church offered men like ha-Lorki and Paul of Burgos “a rich tradition of humanism and secular culture.”12 This seems to me yet another example of the tendency of religious believers of every era to “spiritualize” conversions for which there are overweening secular reasons, ranging from economic self-interest to fear of extermination. No institution detested Averroism more than the Catholic Church, and the “rich tradition of humanism and secular culture” associated with Catholicism was, for the average Christian believer, a cloud no bigger than an artist’s hand or a writer’s pen at the end of the fourteenth century. The rediscovery of vital Greek texts ranging from treatises on engineering and mathematics to lost plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles did not really begin until the third decade of the fifteenth century in Italy.*6 At the time when the Jews of Iberia began their mass conversion in the 1390s, the full emergence of Christian humanism—in art, science, and critical thinking—lay roughly a century in the future. What Christianity had to offer Jews was power and protection, not humanism.

  The language of educated discourse among intellectuals of different faiths in Iberia was Arabic, not Latin. Both the towering twelfth-century Jewish scholar Maimonides, writing in Arabic, and the thirteenth-century Christian Aquinas, who of course wrote in Latin, were intent on reconciling classical Greek philosophy, specifically Aristotle, with their respective religious traditions. Maimonides attempted this task first, and he was certainly no Averroist. Aquinas’s conclusions were far more hostile to Averroism, particularly in his rejection of Averroës’s belief that at a fundamental level—regardless of religion—all humans share the same intellect that makes them part of something greater. Nothing could be further removed from the reasoning of Aquinas, who, though he was certainly a part of secular culture (to the extent that it existed in medieval Christendom), was definitely not a humanist or a precursor of secular humanism in the modernist sense.*7 It is utterly anachronistic to believe that a fourteenth-century Jewish convert in Spain (even if that convert was an admirer of Averroës) would have considered Catholicism more hospitable than Judaism to Averroist humanism.

  Paul’s reply to ha-Lorki, of which only a small segment has been preserved, is, in its own way, a classic of the hairsplitting that characterizes so many converts who have exchanged one absolute truth for another, or a lesser truth for what they consider a higher truth. It was, in Paul’s view, the duty of Jews to question the truth of their religion, and consider the possibility that Christianity was superior, precisely because Messianic prophecy was a fundamenta
l principle of Judaism. Paul reasons that “scrutiny is the door of hope through which I entered the New Covenant—I and my friends—and this is the gate of the Lord through which the righteous enter.”13 In a triumph of circular reasoning, however, Paul absolves Jews of any responsibility to investigate the claims of Islam, because Islam is demonstrably a false religion—since no one but Jesus of Nazareth could possibly be the fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy. In spite of his tortuous analyses of who is, and is not, bound to question his faith and examine the claims of other faiths, Paul—like Augustine—concludes that faith itself is not the product of human reason but is granted only by the grace of God. Christian faith demands that humans use their reason—but only insofar as reason, augmented and guided by divine grace, leads them to a deeper belief in the truth of Christianity.

  In Paul’s theological scheme, Christians, like Jews—if they are living in a place like Spain, where they have contact with other religions—are bound to question the truth of their own faith. But if a Christian is living on an island and never meets people of any other faith, he is not required to ask such questions. Perhaps what was lost in the incomplete record of Paul’s reply to ha-Lorki was his explanation of exactly how one formulates questions in the absence of any challenges. This type of convoluted rationalization is inevitable for intellectual converts to religions with absolute truth claims; the need for justification is evident in converts not only to monotheistic religions but to rigid, politically driven secular ideologies. Censorship—whether exercised by religious institutions or totalitarian governments—is simply an attempt to suppress the questions that Paul considered a moral duty even for medieval Christians.

  •

  The state of Paul’s ambition as well as his theology may be inferred from the fact that he left Burgos within the year after his conversion, to study Catholic theology in Paris. There he met Cardinal Pedro de Luna of Aragon, who was Pope Clement VII’s representative to France, England, Scotland, and what are now the Benelux countries. In 1394, Cardinal de Luna, who is considered an antipope by the Roman Catholic Church today, was elected pontiff by his supporters; took the name of Benedict XIII; and played an important role in perpetuating a papal schism that eventually saw three different men, in several different places, from Avignon to Rome, lay claim to the office of head of the Holy Roman Catholic Church between 1378 and 1417.

  Exactly when Paul was ordained a priest is uncertain, but his rise in the church hierarchy began after his alliance with Benedict. In 1398, Benedict appointed Paul archdeacon of Treviño and made him the official papal representative to Castile. During this period, Paul also became an adviser to King Enrique III. Paul’s close association with Enrique was a key factor in the Castilian king’s agreement to side with Benedict in the continuing papal schism. Paul was so close to Enrique that he was made one of the three executors of his will in 1406. It was during the period of Paul’s close friendship with the king that new anti-Jewish legislation was enacted. Enrique ordered bishops in Castile to excommunicate any Catholic judge or official who honored and enforced contracts obliging Christians to pay interest to Jewish moneylenders. In one particularly interesting twist, Enrique also decreed civil penalties for Christians who confessed, before a lay or an ecclesiastical court, to having borrowed money from Jews. Any Jew who demanded such an admission would be penalized the same amount. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

  After Enrique’s death in 1406, Paul remained close to the two regents, the king’s widow, Catalina (the same Catalina who had been the prospective bride when Paul, then Solomon, was a diplomatic hostage in Aquitaine), and his brother, the Infante Fernando. Many scholars blame Paul’s influence for a major piece of anti-Jewish economic legislation prohibiting Jews from engaging in their previous role of collecting taxes for the monarchy. Even though the evidence of Paul’s involvement is probative rather than definitive, there is one certainty: Paul never made any attempt to help unconverted Jews (unless pressuring them to convert is considered “help”). Paul’s silence, given his influence with monarchs since the 1380s, would have provided support for anti-Jewish economic laws even if he himself did not propose them.

  Nor did Paul ever speak out against the much harsher laws issued by the Castilian government in 1412 in the city of Valladolid. The Valladolid Laws, also known as Laws of Catalina, affected both Jews and Muslims (although the economic impact on the former was much greater). For the first time, Jews were to be confined to their own quarters in cities. In a wide variety of businesses and professions—from medicine to shoemaking—Jews were forbidden to deal with Christian customers (although this law was not always enforced). Jewish men, in another spottily enforced edict, were ordered to let their hair and beards grow in order to distinguish them visibly from their Christian neighbors. They were no longer entitled to the honorific “Don.” Whatever the levels of enforcement in different cities, the Laws of Catalina added social humiliation to the economic strictures of earlier statutes restricting Jewish moneylending and tax farming. It could not have been clearer that the remnants of the golden age (arguably always closer to bronze than gold) of the Convivencia in Spain were losing their luster for both Jews and Muslims.

  Paul remained at the Castilian court until 1416, dividing his time between his duties as tutor to the future King Juan II (fulfilling a wish expressed by Juan’s father, Enrique) and his functions as a bishop. When he retired from court, he devoted more of his attention to ecclesiastical than royal politics (although the two were always intertwined). Paul’s departure from court took place as the fortunes of the antipope Benedict, the former Cardinal de Luna, waned. He would be deposed as pope at the Council of Constance in 1417, which officially ended the papal schism. But Paul remained in the church’s good graces, as demonstrated by his elevation to archbishop of Philippi in Macedonia shortly before his death in 1435.

  After leaving court, Paul wrote two Spanish-language works of Christian apologetics and history. The best known is Siete edades del mundo (The Seven Ages of the World), dedicated to his former pupil King Juan II. The work was probably completed at some point in the 1420s. Seven Ages is a deeply boring, conventional work based on the mistaken classical and medieval concept that the stages of man’s development are analogous to the universe’s stages of development. One of the few “original” aspects of this work is that it divides the history of the world into seven stages, instead of the six stages used by Augustine in The City of God—a convention normally followed in the Middle Ages. The first stage deals with biblical history (treated as if it is literally true) from the Creation until the birth of Noah, and the book proceeds until the final age, which ends with a summary of Castilian history from Noah through the reign of Juan II. No doubt the biblical-era inhabitants of modern Castile had heard all about the Ark! Juan is presented as the redeemer of Castile, in a fashion not at all dissimilar to the presentation of Jesus as the Messiah. Judith Gale Krieger, in an essay comparing Seven Ages with the Purim letter, contrasts the “energy and exuberance” of ha-Levi’s Purim observations from Aquitaine with the “perfunctory and unaesthetic style” of Paul’s post-Christian writing. For Krieger, Seven Ages—which makes no reference either to Paul’s Jewish background or to what was happening to Jews in Castile—“attests to the tragic historical circumstances which pressured him and thousands of others into conversion and the suppression of their ethnic identity.” She asserts that the Purim poem and Seven Ages speak “not only of medieval Jewish life and the history of the world and Spain respectively. They tell also of Solomon Halevi [sic] and Pablo de Santa Maria and of the artistic sterility born of the usurpation of man’s freedom.”14 She sees the obliteration of Solomon ha-Levi in the writings of Paul, whereas Netanyahu sees religious and ethnic treason. The interpretations are not mutually exclusive.

  We cannot know exactly what proportion of Jewish conversions to Christianity were undertaken for entirely pragmatic rather than spiritual reasons during this period, but it defies reason to attribute more than
a small number of such conversions to a genuine change of faith. Paul of Burgos may have been one of the few, but I doubt it. If his was a true change of faith, it was conveniently timed. Paul likely convinced himself, as the years passed, that his opportunistic behavior truly was motivated by a deep recognition that Jesus, and the Catholic Church, were the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. I see him as the kind of chameleon who appears in every culture and every era of human history—the pagan merchant in the late Roman Empire who becomes a Christian after Constantine; the English Catholic landowner who sides with Henry VIII when he breaks with Rome in the sixteenth century; the revolutionary idealist who becomes a brutal apparatchik under Stalin; the mainstream American Protestant who, contemplating a political career in heavily Mormon Utah or Nevada, converts to Mormonism. To rationalize their behavior, such converts frequently transform opportunism into righteousness in their own minds. They are living a lie, but they may not be lying consciously.

  * * *

  *1 Since Dante wrote in the Tuscan vernacular, which Solomon ha-Levi certainly did not know, he would not have read The Divine Comedy before his conversion.

  *2 In the United States today, proselytizing right-wing Christian groups frequently refer to Jewish converts as “completed Jews.”

  *3 I will generally use the term “Conversos” in this book, because it is more neutral than either of the other words for Jews who converted under duress as well as their descendants. Anousim is a term used mainly by observant Jews and rabbinical authorities and has often been used historically by rabbis to determine what degree of force can remove the moral opprobrium attached to conversion in the observant Jewish community. “Marranos,” although it has long been a term used by many Jews, has derogatory origins.